Echoing Tao_E. Too much coffee can make you angry and unforgiving, but drinking water makes your outlook relatively positive. Not enough sleep can cause forgetfulness. Damage to particular parts of the brain will damage particular parts of your personality -- which in turn will affect other parts.
Are we discussing the mechanism of the body, or the experience that is associated with the body? In otherwords, the body (a machine), registers stimuli. But what of the conscious experience that goes with that registry of stimuli? It is a non-physical phenomenon, yet we do experience something, and we remember that experience. Furthermore, we can recall that experience and relive the emotion that that experience generated. And we can do that at will, or else have it forced upon us. So for a moment, we are able to live in that time and that expeirience, though it has long passed.
We do not understand the dibilitating results of the body's ability to respond to stimuli. All we know is that the person trapped within the malfunctioning body, can not express themselves as you or I can (under normal conditions). But that does not qualify a dibilitated person as a "non entity", simply because they can no longer react to the world as we expect them to. It simply means they no longer have the mechanisms to interact with the outside world (that is you and I, and their surroundings). Their character isn't gone, it still exists (since we know that energy can not be created nor destroyed). And sometimes it breaks free of the confines placed upon it, and shocks those that love that person, which generates hope. Hope is not something a "machine" could ever conceptualize, since it has no substance, is not an algorhythm, and can not be physically defined.
Example: When I shattered my arm and leg, the doctors placed "nerve blocks" to those limbs, while they put them back together. Now I was aware that my limbs were numb, and I could not move them because of the nural block interupting the signals from those limbs, but I still knew they existed and were attached. I knew that, yet I sensed something was wrong, because I could not command them to do my bidding. In short, I was trapped in a disfunctional body, yet I was aware of self and that disfunctioning part of myself.
The comatose victim who is considered consciously brain dead, yet can hear and feel their family around them, and struggles to rise to the "surface" in order to "contact" their family, and let them know they are still around.
The dream state we sometimes achieve wherein our bodies are paralyzed, yet we still think and fight to regain control of our bodies and "consciousness", in order to react within the physical world.
This is not biometrics. Just because the body (machine) might not function correctly, does not mean the spirit within is not there. Unlike a state of the art vehicle which shuts down to protect the rest of the system, and never considers the option of trying to start up again, the human being struggles to become "operational" again. The human being registers time. The human being dreams and fights to live.
Unlike a machine, the human being has something within that strives to exist, contemplates feelings, looks for answers that can not be logically or pysically found, yet finds them anyway.
What is that driving force? What is that part of us that refuses to die, or chooses to die? What part of that makes us so different that we would deliberately lay down our life, for something or someone dear to us? It certainly is not self preservation. It is not some instinct. It is choice and choice comes from other than the basic electrochemical function of a machine, computer and ancillory systems that make up the physical body.
There is a soul. And when it leaves the body, the body changes (even if kept alive by machines). To look at a functioning body with no body home, is one of the saddest sights a loved one can experience.
In my life I have witness many "drown victims". Some I knew were gone, others I knew were still in their but could not hang on, and others still weren't giving up without a fight, as long as we helped them from the outside. All suffered the same plight. Physically all were dead, but what was inside was not.
v/r
Q
But have you learned more since?
